Nokia was bullish on its technology developments and cautious on telco capex.  CEO Rajeev Suri described the telecom market as having tough market conditions and expects telco equipment market revenues down in 2018.  He said the Swedish competitor pricing aggressively and that it will be difficult to keep share in China with 5G ramp.  He said Nokia is executing on plan to grow non telco verticals – and it will take 3+ years before it is sizable enough to potentially offset telco challenges.  He emphasized a key strength is its focus on cost reductions.  He highlighted success in cable MSO market and that its FP4-based router will ship in a few days.  Suri thinks 5G could roll out in China first, maybe tied with US.  Nokia CEO's comments were quite similar about 5G rollout timing expectations compared to comments made at Huawei’s recent conference (2019 initial deployments; chipsets 2019; broadening deployments in 2020).

Some more details from Rajeev Suri's presentation:
Ericsson.  We were surprised that the CEO of Nokia took the opportunity to take some digs at Ericsson.  He said that Ericsson is pricing aggressively; it also shared some quantitative statistics about competitive take-outs of Ericsson installed base. He argued that it has broadest portfolio in industry (fixed, software are examples).  

China.  Two interesting comments about China – a) will be difficult to maintain share in China as 5G rolls out, b) China might be first to deploy 5G.  
Emphasized that Amazon Web Services is making a presentation at this conference.  Said its new FP4-based routers are more efficient than any competitor and will be so for at least the next year.

Other presenters made comments about 5G mainly.  Here are some interesting comments:
Artificial Intelligence.  The company has a lot of network automation technology that is it working on but would not share details about this technology.  We guess Nokia is more open with its customers and that it'll make announcements at MWC '18 in Barcelona.
5G Radio.  Beamforming is a key technology that will be highlighted in 5G.  Also, the company's separation of Stage 1 and Stage 2 MIMO processing makes the bandwidth needs from baseband to array be much less than competitors.  Additionally, the company explains that its expected systems will have dramatically higher efficiency than competitors - again, the company kept its secrets here under wraps.  Late 2018 will see first 5G deployments, going into 2019.
IP/Optical.  Basil Alwan, President IP/Optical division said the first FP4-based product went to production end of the last week.  Major customers will take shipment before the end of this quarter.  The company will ship its 57 Terabit router during 1Q18.  SD-WAN will replace MPLS VPNs over time, perhaps at a rapid pace.  

Service Provider presentations:
Amazon Web Services IoT.  Satyam Yadav, GM of AWS IoT made a presentation at this meeting.  The presentation focused on how Amazon's IoT software and its services would be used in a partnership with Nokia to deliver Amazon IoT services.  
Sprint.  Ron Marquardt, CTO.  He is not sure how much customers might pay for lower-latency connections available from 5G.  Now that the uncertainty of the T-Mobile US acquisition is beyond us, Sprint says it is rapidly focusing on spending to upgrade its network.  Sprint also said it plans to deal with fewer vendors in the future.
Elisa. The Finnish operator presented data about its extraordinary data traffic growth and its per-subscriber data usage being far above competitors as well as other service providers in the world. 
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Ericsson and Cisco representatives provided an upbeat presentation about the corporate partnership, offered some customer success metrics and discussed some new initiatives. The teams held back from providing concrete measures of progress such as revenues. Our judgement is that since each is continuing to make joint offerings, the relationship is moving ahead.

Customer engagement progress was characterized at 100+ deals and 300+ engagements.  
It is interesting to figure out what each of the two parties deliver to customers.  The way the two companies characterize what each is good at and what each delivers to customers is quite similar to the way it was characterized at the previous year's MWC 2016 presentation - with one possible exception: Each of the spokespersons said that customers are using the Ericsson wireless packet core (Cisco also sells wireless packet core).

Roles and Responsibilities.  Generally, the teams still see the roles and responsibilities split up as follows:

• Cisco does "IP," generally and specifically cited routing and WiFi
• Ericsson does Radio Access and provides professional services, OSS/BSS and typically serves as the Systems Integrator
• Cisco sees this partnership as a means to target emerging markets.  This is because Ericsson has significant market presence in emerging markets.
• Working on smaller deals up front, then if the relationship works, will pursue bigger sized deals.

Given how strategic the NFV landscape is for the future of the telecom industry, we were interested in each company's participation in NFV Orchestration.  The partners say the way they split up the orchestration between each other would typically be as follows:  Cisco's NSO is used typically in managing the network and resources (Cisco claims it wins big here).  Ericsson's transport-oriented NFV is typically used. And then Ericsson's orchestration system manages both Cisco's and Ericsson's lower level management systems.

Some wins discussed:

• 3 Italy
• C&W
• Aster Dominican Republic
• Vodafone PT
• Evolved WiFi networks in Africa
• Next Generation Network - Middle East
• W transformation.  Vodafone Hutchinson AU
• IP Transformation - Telefonica Latam

As we explained earlier, the partners discussed new three initiatives discussed for the future:

• Collaboration Mobile Convergence mobile phone used as enterprise device). UC, presence, messaging from Cisco using its Spark offering and Telco TAS delivering VoLTE from ERIC.  CMC is intended to allow mobile phones to be useful communications devices for enterprise users.  In this case, users will make VoLTE calls using the regular dialer of the phone and can use collaboration capabilities using the Cisco Spark application.  Avail late 2017.  There is a press release with more detail.
• WiFi/Small Cell joint offering.  Uses Ericsson small cell and Cisco WiFi.  Together, these systems allow traffic steering.  
• Managed security from Cisco.  Orchestrated by Ericsson.

At the Ericsson Media and Analyst Briefing today, Ericsson's new CEO Borje Ekholm made his first MWC presentation, and then ceded the stage to well-known T-Mobile USA (TMUS) Chief Technology Officer, Neville Ray.  We learned several things that were interesting: T-Mobile's plans for 5G rollout and 2G/3G shutdown, and Ericsson's high-level view on its strengths as 5G rolls out.

Neville Ray's comments conveyed a pragmatic and agile service provider's views:

• 2/3rds of all voice minutes are now on Voice over LTE (VoLTE).  Ray challenged anyone in the audience to find another telecom service provider with a greater percentage of minutes on VoLTE.
• 93% of all wireless data is transmitted on LTE
• Plans to shut down 2G and/or 3G when 5G rolls out, elaborating that the company has decomissioned the 'lion's share' of 2G spectrum utilization.  However, Ray says it has found significant customer interest in its 2G (GSM) network for connecting to Internet of Things (IoT) devices fitted with GSM modules.  In fact, there is a debate at TMUS as to whether to shut down the 3G network before the 2G network.  TMUS claims it has taken share from AT&T because its competitor shut down its 2G network and IoT customers in the US market have signed up with TMUS.
• The company echoed views it has shared with the media in recent months - that it isn't so committed to virtualizing its network at this point.  The CTO explained that it has a sufficiently modern network core that it isn't necessary to upgrade to a Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) infrastructure - at least until it rolls out 5G - and he put the conversion-to-NFV timeframe at 3 to 4 years.
• TMUS is not thrilled with the prospects for 5G fixed wireless, the kind that replaces wired broadband.  He said that if this is all 5G does for the industry, we may as well all go home.
• The company has deployed only 1,000 small cells to date.  It plans as many as 5,000 to 6,000 by the end of 2017.  Part of this rollout is using unlicensed spectrum, and it will roll out LTE-U and LAA.

Ericsson CEO Borje Ekholm positioned Ericsson's view on 5G:

• 5G will be based on the cloud, and potentially we could see entire 5G networks running entirely on the cloud
• Ericsson is well positioned in 5G due to its exposure to virtualization, security and its strong position in OSS/BSS.